Harm's WayRating: 4.25 stars
Buy Link:
Amazon | All Romance | Amazon UK
Length: Novel


Zach is incredibly successful in business and has made Vice President while still being in his 20s. He works hard and likes to keep busy, partly to drown out what he sees as a failure to his ex-wife when he came out and subsequently his absence from his young daughter’s life. Men find him attractive and he can find company if he wants to, but Zach’s life is about to get really complicated, bizarre, and dangerous. Zach has unexplained dreams and a memory lapse of his early childhood years, but it’s all about to come back to him as Zach learns that his father was a serial killer.

When people disappear and Zach can’t account for his actions, Zach starts to panic that being a murderer is genetic. Determined to uncover the truth as well as his true nature, Zach visits his abandoned childhood home only to discover more than he ever wanted to know, as well as a stranger that may be linked to his haunted past. Zach is plunged into his own real life nightmare where time escapes him, his memory has holes, and no one and maybe nowhere is truly safe.

The story has murder, mystery, intrigue, and thrills set at a fast pace. For the first half of the book, there is just enough offered to set the tone and scene while still not revealing exactly what is going on. Knight creates an atmosphere that offers creepiness with well chosen words and a tempo to match. We are purposely kept in the dark on a number of events and characters in an effort to keep the mystery.

So with a mystery, of course, it’s difficult to discuss the plot without giving anything away. But we stay with Zach throughout the course of the book where strange and unexplained things happen to him and around him. People are missing, his memory is spotty, he finds himself in places he can’t recall getting to, and he’s on the verge of becoming unhinged as he’s sure he’s going to follow in his father’s footsteps. His deserted childhood home offers the perfect haunted backdrop and then there is a stranger who wants to get close to Zach in all of the ways and Knight draws you into the madness.

I don’t read mysteries often because I tend to be able to follow many of the twists and turns, I can often read between the lines, and nothing is ever really random. After the halfway point here I did have the majority of the mystery figured out and then it was a matter of watching the other characters catch up. The book is also told primarily from Zach’s POV so we only are supposed know what he knows or thinks he knows. But, I did have some issues with the POV at times. There would be scenes where we were solidly in Zach’s head, but then the view would shift to another character for just a few sentences within a paragraph and would then shift back. This happened at some point for almost every character that was on page with Zach and it was just off and definitely broke the flow of the narrative.

The ending wrapped up, but there were a couple of unanswered thoughts as to some of the motivations and actions of some of the characters along the way. For me, this felt like a case where the author knew his characters well but then didn’t get it all across onto the page.

It was a definite thrill to have had the opportunity to check this book out. If murder, mystery, and a haunted past and present get your heart pounding, you could also check out exactly what is putting Zach in harm’s way.

 

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